FANTOM PLANET is "some random geographer's" opinionated output about all things geospatial, geotechnical, and whatever else on location based information and services.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Easy Way from IMS to MapServer (or Ka-Map?)

Just another ignorant question fueled by the existence of Datum Shift:

"How do I migrate from ArcIMS to MapServer or to Ka-Map? Is there a utility to "easily" convert AXL to MapScript?"

Seriously, though, I had a bad day with ArcGIS. It may have been my three year haitus from GIS? It may have been gremlins? But whatever it was yesterday, it sucked. I tried to export a project to PDF, GeoPDF, and even AI for printing and all I got was a self-closing version of ArcGIS. (Steve had a similar issue yesterday too.)
This all happened late yesterday and my ESRI rep was able to recommend something that required a ScanDisk and a defragment. So, I put the wheels in motion last night before I left the office. Hopefully, this morning what I did worked.
Oh!
The other thing that confused the hell out of me and some colleagues was: measuring the area of GRID rasters in ArcMap. I know that I need to use the Zonal Statistics tool, but I needed to convert the Grids to something else. Anyway, long story short, a friend hacked it out for me and got my area measurement.
Note to ESRI for 9.3 & 10.0 devleopment: The above—Not as easy as it should be.

1 Comments:

nice post. ths summarizes many of my frustrations with their software: mysterious crashes, and too much effort required for the simplest of tasks. As soon as there is an opensource methods for *quickly* producing nice maps they are going to have something to worry about. Until then GMT is my cartographic tool of choice.